British Journal for the History of Philosophy

ISSN: 0960-8788 (Print) 1469-3526 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbjh20

Bergson and the spiritualist origins of the ideology

of creativity in philosophy

Giuseppe Bianco

To cite this article: Giuseppe Bianco (2019): Bergson and the spiritualist origins of the
ideology of creativity in philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, DOI:
10.1080/09608788.2019.1684240

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2019.1684240

Published online: 12 Nov 2019.

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BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2019.1684240

ARTICLE

Bergson and the spiritualist origins of the ideology of

creativity in philosophy
Giuseppe Bianco
FFLCH, Universidade do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

ABSTRACT
Henri Bergson (1859–1940), the most prominent member of nineteenth-century
French spiritualism, is the first philosopher who explicitly defined philosophy as
a practice which consists in posing problems anew and in creating concepts. In
this article, I will try to reconstruct the progressive importance acquired by the
terms ‘problem’ and ‘concept’ in nineteenth-century French philosophy and
how they combined in Bergson’s theories about creativity, invention and
novelty. I will argue that Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a creative
intellectual practice was the result of a negotiation, inside a pre-existent
spiritualist framework, between, on the one hand, neo-Kantianism and, on the
other hand, evolutionism which strongly influenced empirical psychology and
the emerging social sciences. Bergson’s solution, influenced by the evolution
of mathematics and literary theory, was just one of the possible options, and
the main alternative to a new form of transcendental philosophy.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 7 July 2019; Revised 7 October 2019; Accepted 14 October 2019

KEYWORDS Spiritualism; Bergson; creation; lexicography; interiority

Henri Bergson (1859–1940), the most prominent member of the nineteenth-

century French spiritualist tradition, is the first philosopher who explicitly
defined philosophy as a practice consisting in posing problems anew and
in creating concepts. In this essay, I will try to reconstruct the progressive
importance acquired by the terms ‘problem’ and ‘concept’ in nineteenth-
century French philosophy and how they combined in Bergson’s theories
about creativity, invention and novelty. I will argue that Bergson’s conception
of philosophy as a creative intellectual practice was the result of a negotiation,
inside a pre-existing spiritualist framework, between neo-Kantianism and evo-
lutionism, which strongly influenced empirical psychology and the emerging
social sciences. Bergson’s solution, influenced by the evolution of mathemat-
ics and literary theory, was just one of the possible options, and the main
alternative to a new form of transcendental philosophy. This idea of philos-
ophy as creation of concepts, is ideological insofar it was both anachronistic

CONTACT Giuseppe Bianco bepz@libero.it

© 2019 BSHP
2 G. BIANCO

and a tool used in order to legitimate a type of practice that was under attack
at that moment. Although it was a ‘French ideology’, we can find similar pos-
itions in Germany at that same time, especially in Nietzsche and in the so-
called philosophies of life (see Bianco, “Philosophies of Life”).
In order to substantiate my argument, I start by clarifying the meaning of
the terms ‘concept’ and ‘problem’ that Kant had been the first to fix (Section
1). I then move to a brief analysis of the first and second phases of consolida-
tion of philosophy as an independent discipline in France through the import
of texts from Germany (Sections 2 and 3), and to their effect on Bergson’s first
steps in philosophy (Section 4). I proceed to analyse the emergence of the
theme of creativity in literary theory, mathematics, psychology, and, as an
effect, in philosophy and history of philosophy (Sections 5 and 6). I then
describe how the emerging social sciences criticized philosophy (Section 7),
and provoked a reflection on philosophical terminology (Section 8). After
having explained Bergson’s ‘return’ to metaphysics (Section 9), I will conclude
on the legacy of his ‘creative’ conception of philosophy (Section 10).

1. Begriffe and Aufgabe

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) marked a revolution
in the usage of both the terms ‘concept’ and ‘problem’.1 In order to not perpe-
trate the confusion between different types of representations, blurred since
Descartes’ systematic usage of the term ‘idea’, he invited his readers to maintain
the following accurate distinction: a perception is a representation (Vorstellung)
accompanied by consciousness; a sensation is a representation related only to
the subject; and knowledge is an objective perception. Knowledge consists in
both an intuition (Anschauung) and in a concept (Begriff). An idea is a concept
not derived from the senses and that, because of its width, cannot be related
to anything one may experience. Concepts allow for the unification of the
pure difference provided by the senses and the different representations
under a common broader representation. Empirical concepts are related to sen-
sible intuitions and they provide new knowledge; pure concepts, or categories,
are related to any possible experience, but, in themselves, they do not provide
any knowledge. Finally, the Ideas of reason overcome both real and possible
experience. These ideas are ‘problematic concepts’, since they are non-contra-
dictory, and therefore possible, but they do not refer to any existing object.
Kant opposed the ‘problematic judgement’, to the ‘assertoric’ and ‘apodic-
tic’: while the latter two respectively state an actual truth or a necessary truth,
the former affirms a possible truth. The problematic judgement is possible as a
geometrical problem, which, in order to be solved, has to be constructed. The
1
On the broader history of these two terms, see Sophie Roux’s “Notion/concept/idée” and Giuseppe
Bianco, “The Misadventures of the ‘Problem’ in ‘Philosophy.’”
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3

term ‘problem’ appears in the first lines of the preface to the Critique, where
“human reason” is described as “burdened with questions which it cannot
dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason
itself”. Its importance is even more evident in the introduction to the Critique
of Practical Reason (1788), in which the moral law is compared to postulates as
‘practical rules’ under a problematic condition of the will, and in the second
edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, from the same year, where Kant
assigns to metaphysics three ‘unavoidable problems’, tied to the concepts
of God, freedom and immortality.
Kant argued that investigations of certain problems could not reach a sol-
ution, since human reason, far from being all-powerful, is limited. Metaphysics
is ‘dogmatic’ in so far as it “takes on the execution of this task [Aufgabe]
without an antecedent examination of the capacity or incapacity of reason
for such a great undertaking”. These impossible problems, the ones proper
to the Ideas of reason, were related to a more fundamental one: the
‘problem of pure reason’, concerning the possibility of producing new non-
empirical knowledge, namely synthetic a priori judgements. The aim of the
first Critique was to show that this problem can only be solved if it is posed
according to a method which is not ‘dogmatic’, but ‘transcendental’. By point-
ing out the limits of human reason and by reducing the concepts of metaphy-
sics to the Ideas of pure reason as unsolvable problems, Kant claimed to have
solved the question concerning the possibility of the progressiveness and
veracity of scientific knowledge. The invention of a transcendental style of
argumentation, a philosophical one, implied a new way of posing problems,
which allowed for the distinction between scientific and metaphysical problems:
a scientific problem has a solution and results in new knowledge; a metaphysical
problem is a problem whose solution can only be the object of faith. Finally, a
philosophical way of treating a problem entails beginning to consider it using
transcendental structures. This conception of philosophy also implied a way of
organizing the production of knowledge inside the reformed universities of
the Kingdom of Prussia starting from the nineteenth century: transcendental
philosophy was the ruler in the holistic organization of the broader ‘Faculty of
Philosophy’, which implied disciplines such as ethics, philology or history, but
as well mathematics, physics and natural history.

2. The ideas of the spirit

For these structural reasons, during the nineteenth-century German vocabul-
aries and encyclopaedias never neatly separated philosophy from the
sciences, and there was no clear distinction between philosophical concepts
and scientific concepts, except the one that could be drawn from the distinc-
tion between the a priori and the a posteriori. On account of the Napoleonic
reform of 1808 and of the clear-cut separation it established between the
4 G. BIANCO

Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Letters, where philosophy was taught, it
was in France that the first Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques (1844–
1852) appeared. Edited by Adolphe Franck (1810–1893), and separating phi-
losophical concepts from scientific ones, the dictionary was dominated by a
peculiar theoretical framework: eclectic spiritualism. Thanks to Victor Cousin
(1792–1867) and his collaborators, this current had become the official form
of philosophy taught in the university and the lycées, and it reigned, uncon-
tested, until the 1870s, despite signals of new trends (e.g. the appointment
of Ravaisson as the president of the agrégation’s jury and Lachelier’s teachings
at the École normale during the 1860s).
The doctrine was ‘spiritualist’ because it identified the mind (Esprit) with an
immortal and free soul implying faculties and innate ideas, inaccessible to
physiology. Spiritualists considered ‘psychology’ to be the science of the
mind, able to provide the ground for both metaphysics and the regional
sciences. Psychology was based on a peculiar intellectual operation called
‘internal’ or ‘intimate’ feeling (sens interne or sens intime), through which the
philosopher could access a set of observable ‘facts’ ( faits) or ‘data’ (données)
proper to consciousness. Starting from the 1820s, in articles that would be
gathered in his Fragments philosophiques (1826), Victor Cousin described as
‘données immédiates de la conscience’ the object of ‘psychology’. At the
same moment, in the French translation of Thomas Reid’s (1710–1796) An
Inquiry Into the Human Mind (1769), Théodore Jouffroy (1796–1842), one of
Cousin’s friends and closest collaborators, used the expression ‘données de
la conscience’. Spiritualism was in fact the result of the combination of Kantian-
ism, Scottish common-sense philosophy and Pierre Maine de Biran’s (1766–
1824) psychology.
Cousin had also been one of main protagonists in the popularization of the
term ‘intuition’, used to translate the German Anschauung. This term had been
used in Maine de Biran’s Sur l’aperception immédiate (1807), an essay concern-
ing the difference between internal apperception, intuition, sensation and
feeling. In 1934 Cousin edited Biran’s posthumous work, the Nouvelles con-
sidérations sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme and, in 1841,
the whole corpus of Biran’s Oeuvres philosophiques. The Biranian opposition
between apperception and sensation – and, by extension, between the
moral and the physical – explains why Lachelier would later label him the
‘French Kant’ and why spiritualism would lay its foundations on a blend of
Biran and Kant.
Adolphe Garnier (1801–1864) in Précis de psychologie (1832), Joseph Tissot
(1801–1876) in Cours élémentaire de philosophie (1840) and Félix Ravaisson
(1813–1900) in De l’habitude (1838) all used the term, but there was no unan-
imously established distinction between intellectual intuition, sensible intui-
tion and perception. Further precision was achieved in Garnier’s Traité des
faculties de l’âme (1852), where he distinguished between, on the one hand,
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 5

an ‘empirical intuition’, a passive uncertain knowledge coming from the

senses, and, on the other hand, a ‘pure intuition’ that can be either ‘external’
or ‘internal’, such as the certitude of the Ego.
By using Reid against Locke and Maine de Biran and Kant against the
legacy of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780) and the Idéologues, the
spiritualists aimed to delegitimize all forms of materialism and empiricism,
together called ‘sensualism’. These were considered not only contradictory
but also politically and religiously dangerous; sensualism was considered as
the main ideological framework of the Revolution. The sensualists believed
that, given that the human being is ultimately a ‘product’ of reinforced
habits, a proper education was needed to free him from metaphysics and
dogmatism. Thus the quarrel between eclecticism and sensualism was also
a clash between competing pedagogical models. On the contrary, for the spir-
itualists, empirical knowledge could not be acquired without the existence of
a unitary, free Ego, implying innate faculties and ideas. I have called this pos-
tulate Philosophy’s Legitimizing Axiom or PLA (Bianco, “What Was ‘Serious Phil-
osophy’ for the Young Bergson?”): it asserts the human mind’s unity, agency,
and immateriality, as well as its independence from the physical and biologi-
cal determination studied by other knowledge producers. Crucially, this axiom
justifying the existence of philosophy as a distinct discipline remained compa-
tible with the ideology defended by religious and juridical institutions: man
had to be free and independent in order to be judged both by God and by
other men. At least until the end of the century, without accepting the PLA,
no knowledge-producer had been able to work as a ‘philosopher’ in a
public educational institution.
Spiritualism was ‘eclectic’ because it was based on a patchwork of various
elements taken from past philosophers, classed in four types: materialism
idealism, scepticism and mysticism. Spiritualist philosophers maintained
that the doctrines coming from the past represented partial views, and had
to be united in a balanced synthesis. The eclectic ‘history of philosophy’ –
the first examples of which are Cousin’s Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie
(1828), and Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie moderne (1841) – was the
result of a negotiation between two opposed visions of the mind: a static
one, proper to those close to the clergy, and a progressive one, defended
by the Idéologues. According to Cousin and his collaborators, the history of
human knowledge, incarnated in ‘schools’ and ‘sects’, ‘doctrines’ and
‘systems’, was useful in so far as it exhibited the various attempts to answer
the most abstract questions concerning God, freedom and immortality.
The PLA, the consequent role of ‘psychology’ in study of the mind, and that
of the ‘history of philosophy’ in study of the evolution of knowledge, came to
constitute the undisputed basis of a doctrine transmitted to generations of
philosophers until the late 1860s, and even beyond. Until then, for a professio-
nalized philosopher, namely for a public servant operating in the chairs of
6 G. BIANCO

philosophy belonging to the different Faculties of Letters of the twenty or so

French universities, in the roughly one hundred lycées, at the Ecole normale
supérieure and at the Collège de France, the ideal philosopher was not an ‘inno-
vator’, an original ‘author’, a ‘creator’, but rather the defender and consolidator
of a philosophical synthesis based on the PLA, established by Cousin and his
colleagues. The main reason for this ‘self-image’ was tied to the powerful
influence of the Church: it was simply impossible, for a philosopher, to attri-
bute to the human mind the creative or inventive powers proper to the divi-
nity. As Cousin immediately understood during the 1830s, when he
expurgated the texts of Hegel and Schelling of their most provocative
aspects, if there was something a philosopher had to avoid at any cost, it
was the accusation of pantheism.2
In the fifth tome of Franck’s Dictionnaire, the notice concerning the term
‘Problem’ is extremely short. Franck defined ‘problem’ as an “obscure ques-
tion, about which we only have incomplete data, and whose examination
can lead to opposite results” or as “a proposition that can be defended or
attacked for equally valuable reasons” (Franck, Dictionnaire des sciences philo-
sophiques, 234). Within French spiritualism, the infrequent use of the term
‘problem’, where it appears as a synonym for ‘question’, the quasi-absence
of ‘concept’ and the constant use of ‘idea’ are the signs of a selective
reading of Kant, and of the persistence of a post-Cartesian heritage. In the
entry on ‘concept’, Franck writes that the term ‘notion’, inherited from the
eighteenth century, was more useful to designate the content of conscious-
ness, whereas ‘concept’ was useless, since it was tied to the ‘German
school’. This was the reason why Franck asserted that “only the translators
of Kant” used the word concept, a word that, he concluded “luckily, we
don’t need” (Franck, Dictionnaire, 541).

3. The ‘German school’ in France

Contrary to what Franck had recorded, 30 years after the publication of his
Dictionnaire, French philosophers started using more and more Kantian termi-
nology, including the terms ‘concept’ and ‘problem’. The first importers were
the republicans Augustine Cournot (1801–1877) and Charles Renouvier
(1815–1903), both educated outside of the Faculty of Letters, in the Ecole Poly-
technique, and who studied the Critiques during the 1850s and 1860s. Renou-
vier published, between 1854 and 1864, a series of Essais de critique générale
which featured Kantian terminology. Nonetheless, as he did not belong to
academia his work was almost unknown until the 1870s, when he started pub-
lishing his journal, La critique philosophique. Independently of these two
2
This is the reason why, in 1842, Cousin’s pupil Émile Saisset (1814–1863) both translated Spinoza’s work
into French and warned against its perilousness.
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 7

figures, during the late 1860s and the 1870s, other philosophers become inter-
ested in Kant, and the terms ‘concept’ and ‘problem’ started being more com-
monly used. Emile Boutroux (1845–1921) played an important role and, after
him, a new generation of philosophers made consistent use of the terms.
The propagation of the term ‘concept’ and the discussions surrounding the
nature of concepts also came from another source, namely from the emerging
‘scientific psychology’, which aimed at explaining cognition and behaviour
through external observation and measurement. Despite having been
taught by the spiritualists Pierre Janet (1829–1899) and Jules Lachelier
(1832–1918), Théodule Ribot (1839–1916) followed the path opened by
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) and his French admirer, Hippolyte Taine
(1828–1893). Ribot was influenced as well by German pathologists, physiol-
ogists and naturalists. ‘Concept’ started appearing in La psychologie allemande
contemporaine (1879), and was systematically used in L’évolution des idées gén-
érales (1897) and the Essai sur l’imagination créatrice (1901).
As a result of this situation, the two terms progressively entered into the
manuals intended for training high-school students in the art of the ‘disser-
tation’, a written test assessing the understanding of and expression of a pos-
ition on a given philosophical topic. Among the possible topics, the one
consisting in developing a given ‘problem’ (problème) progressively took on
more and more importance.

4. The mediated data of the social unconscious

Ribot’s work as an ‘importer’ of new texts from both England and Germany
had a crucial impact on all of his contemporaries. None of Bergson’s writings
would have been possible without the scientific material he introduced, trans-
lated and synthetized in the Revue philosophique and in his own books and
essays. Obviously, Bergson had to conform to the PLA: to be a legitimate phi-
losopher one had to defend the unity of the Ego, its accessibility through inti-
mate feeling or reflexivity, and the existence of another type of knowledge of
man other than physiology, namely philosophical psychology. Following
Ravaisson, Janet, Lachelier and Boutroux, Bergson’s work was the result of
an attempt to inscribe the new information provided by Ribot into an
updated framework of spiritualism. When Bergson declared that he always
hated Kantianism, certainly he was not alluding to Lachelier, to whom he dedi-
cated his PhD Time and Free Will, nor to Boutroux, who had been his professor
at the Ecole normale; rather he was thinking to Renouvier, an author that some
of Boutroux’s pupils admired.
What did these influences imply for the notions of ‘concept’ and ‘problem’?
The term ‘problem’, both in the plural and the singular, is used almost thirty
times in Time and Free Will (1889): while ‘question’ seems to be used to indi-
cate local doubts or obstacles, ‘problem’ seems to designate a more general
8 G. BIANCO

question allowing, as Franck underlined, opposing solutions. Bergson’s doc-

toral dissertation explicitly addressed the ‘problem of freedom’, ‘common to
both philosophy and psychology’. Focusing on a problem common to philos-
ophy and psychology was a way to intervene in the debates between the
‘neo-Kantians’ and the ‘empirical psychologists’. The ‘problem’ of free will
was the problem of all problems, and, according to Renouvier, quoted at
the end of Time and Free Will (237–238), it is from this problem that all the
other philosophical problems derived. The ‘idea of duration’, the subtitle of
the dissertation’s second and central chapter (‘The multiplicity of conscious
states’), was developed after a critique addressed to the possibility of measur-
ing the intensity of the facts of consciousness; this ‘idea’, gained through an
‘internal experience’, gave the solution to the problem of freedom, since
this problem was based on a confusion between ‘space’ and ‘duration’.
Bergson pretended to have ‘solved’ the problem ‘empirically’, namely using
the ‘data of consciousness’, and not ‘dialectically’, as the Kantians did. He
claimed to have used internal, psychological observation of the multiplicity
of the durational facts of consciousness. This appeal to psychology was also
present in Matter and Memory, where another ‘metaphysical problem’ – that
of the relation between the body and the mind – is to be transformed into
a ‘psychological problem’ that could be solved through observation.
This ‘empirical’ way of solving a philosophical problem was not based on
physiology, namely external observation, but from internal observation. It
was therefore dependent on the spiritualist framework. In a review of
Janet’s Principes de métaphysique et de psychologie (Bergson, “Compte rendu
des Principes de métaphysique”), published in 1897, Bergson praised the old
Janet as the greatest philosopher alive, and declared he was in full agreement
with his vision of philosophy: he conformed with Janet’s vision of it as “a
science of problems” likely to “progress” (379). The starting point was, of
course, the PLA, namely the certitude of the Ego’s unity, liberty and immateri-
ality, acquired ‘empirically’ without mediation, through internal feeling. Since
Cousin, all of Bergson’s predecessors used different forms of what would go
under the name of ‘introspection’. Before Bergson, Félix Ravaisson, in De l’Ha-
bitude (1839), Alfred Lemoine (1824–1874), in De l’habitude et de l’instinct
(1875) and Victor Egger (1848–1909), in La parole intérieure. Essai de psycholo-
gie descriptive (1881) had already distinguished an internal qualitative life irre-
ducible to space, considered as the foundation of the idea of number (see
Sinclair, “Habit and Time in Nineteenth-Century French Philosophy”).
Bergson inherited the main features of spiritualism, namely the opposition
between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’, temporality and spatiality, quality and quan-
tity. This inheritance was even more important given that, from at least the
1870s, many German physiologists, often influenced by evolutionism, had
tried to show that space was not an a priori form, but the result of a
genesis. This attempt become more relevant with the ‘discovery’ of
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 9

non-Euclidian geometries: given that the axioms of Euclidian geometry could

not be considered as a priori intuitions, they had to be considered as the result
of a genesis.
The natural world, studied by physicians and naturalists, left room for a
science of the ‘internal man’: psychology, reserved for the philosophers. But
this ‘domain’ could not be described using concepts, in so far as concepts
were considered to be arbitrary and spatializing symbols unable to describe
the fluidity of duration. How, then, could philosophers ‘grasp’ and communi-
cate this internal world? That was Bergson’s theoretical impasse, and this is
why, in his writings, at least until the 1930s, the terms of ‘concept’ and ‘con-
ception’ are rare and always negative. It is also the reason for Bergson’s inter-
est in the work of novelists, as a resource of techniques capable of rending,
through images, the ‘incommunicable’ durational aspects of reality.

5. Intuition and invention

Except for the comparison between, fine art production and the free act (Time
and Free Will, 172), until 1901 Bergson did not give any importance to creation,
invention or novelty. These terms were either absent or used without the
theoretical significance of other terms such as quality, movement, interiority,
heterogeneity and temporality. The former group of terms would take on a
growing importance only starting from 1901, and especially with the publi-
cation of ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ (1903) and Creative Evolution (1907).
This happened for two reasons, tied to the state of literary theory and math-
ematics in their relation with scientific psychology.
During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, because of its
internal dynamics, the emerging literary field polarized: at its centre, there
were autonomous producers fighting between themselves, and, on its periph-
ery, heteronomous producers dependent upon external constraints deter-
mined by the broader market of symbolic goods (for this aspect see
Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field). This
duality generated the structuring mental oppositions between gratuitous
art and paid labour, production and reproduction, creation and repetition,
freedom and institutional constraint. During this period, psychologists –
both physicians and philosophers – progressively became interested in litera-
ture, treated as a clinical material. Novelists and poets responded with a
growing interest in these studies, considered as useful tools to implement
their literary techniques. That is the reason why, starting from this moment,
Bergson found a new readership among young knowledge-producers
attracted by the resemblance between his ideas of an internal duration and
the theories of the new anti-naturalist movements, especially symbolism.
Bergson’s ideas of freedom and duration would progressively be associated
to those of creativity and novelty, and Time and Free Will would be associated
10 G. BIANCO

with the avant-gardes, perceived as the purest form of literary creation (in this
connection, see Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson).
In the previous section, I briefly mentioned the relationship between math-
ematicians and physiological psychologists: the first were looking for a
psychological explanation of the genesis of Euclidian space, the latter for
mathematical models useful for the study of human behaviour. Because of
the neat academic separation between ‘Letters’ and ‘Sciences’, France,
unlike Germany, did not produce any relevant epistemological writings on
geometry and mathematics until the 1880s, and the vast majority of philoso-
phers were unaware of the details of research in the formal and natural
sciences. This type of scholarship only appeared in Renouvier’s journal La Cri-
tique philosophique (1871–1889), because almost all of the authors, much like
the journal’s editor, were not philosophers, but engineers or mathematicians.
During the 1880s a new generation of philosophers, taught by Boutroux,
started reading the journal, and some of them decided to embark on a parallel
training in the Faculty of Science. One of these men was Louis Couturat (1868–
1914), one of the founders of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. Because
of him, starting from 1893, and during the next two decades at least, the
journal hosted dozens of articles on the epistemology of mathematics.
Given that Euclidian geometry was revealed to be only one possible geo-
metry, what had to be explained was the origin of the postulates proper to
all possible geometries. One argument was that these postulates were inven-
tions of a creative mind less limited than the one conceived by Kant. Mathe-
maticians started coupling the concept of ‘intuition’ – tied to the a priori forms
of space and time – with that of ‘invention’. This was evident in a famous
lecture that Henri Poincaré gave at the Parisian Institut general de psychologi-
que, entitled “Mathematical Invention”, from 1908. The lecture reflected the
content of an article already published in 1899, “La logique et l’intuition
dans la science mathématique et dans l’enseignement.” During the 1890s,
Poincaré had developed an epistemology asserting that mathematics was
inventive and could not be reduced to logic, as Bertrand Russell (1872–
1970) tried to prove in his Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897).
According to Poincaré, mathematics was not analytic, nor synthetic a priori;
it consisted in conventions, and its evolution was marked by inventions: “it
is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover”, Poincaré
argued, concluding that “to know how to criticize is good, but to know how
to create is better” (Poincaré, Science and Method, 129).
A few months after the publication of this essay, Edouard Le Roy (1870–
1954), a young mathematician who had edited Poincaré’s lecture notes on
the theory of Newtonian potential (1894-95) and published a PhD in math-
ematics, published, in the Revue de métaphysique, a long study entitled
“Science et philosophie” (1899–1900). Le Roy, had been impressed by
Matter and Memory, and met its author as early as in 1896. In his
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 11

1899–1900 article, Le Roy proposed a philosophical synthesis between

Bergson’s own pragmatist conception of science, and an extreme form of
mathematical conventionalism, a form that Poincaré did not hesitate in dis-
avowing and criticizing. Before Bergson, Le Roy used the notion of intuition,
borrowed from the mathematical debates, and especially from Poincaré, in
order to designate the intellectual act of philosophizing. Le Roy underlined
the creative aspects of both reality and the mind, to the point that he did
not hesitate in claiming that ‘facts’ were mental creations, that science was
nothing but a set of useful conventions, that ‘obscure ideas’ had to be privi-
leged over ‘clear ideas’, and that ‘logic kills invention’. Le Roy finally
opposed the ‘notion’ to the ‘concept’, in so far as the second was the result
of generalization and spatialization, whereas the first was the attempt to
grasp the qualitative and moving aspects of reality.
At exactly the same moment, because of an interest in art and mathemat-
ics, psychologists had started studying imagination and its role in invention. In
the Essai sur l’imagination créatrice (1900), Théodule Ribot used formulations
that resonated with those of Poincaré and Le Roy, and that would later
inspire Bergson: “in every creation, big or small” – Ribot wrote – “there is a
directive idea, an ‘ideal’ […] – or, more simply: a problem to be solved”
(Ribot, Essai sur l’imagination créatrice, 130). According to Ribot, reasoning
was always led by a creative imagination; the ability to find a solution to a
certain problem does not depend on its objective elements, passively
received, but from the way in which the mind, through the constant interven-
tion of imagination, is able to actively “change their position” (Ribot, Essai sur
l’imagination créatrice, 217). There is no pre-established ‘method of invention’
because, according to Ribot “it is imagination which invents, which gives to
rational faculties the matter they need, the position and even the solution
to their problems” and “even when a problem looks like it is going to
proceed by itself towards the solution with only the help of reason, imagin-
ation is always present” (Ribot, Essai sur l’imagination créatrice, 204).

6. A new history of philosophical inventors

The welcoming of Bergson as a ‘new philosopher’ able to ‘create’ could only
be possible following a transformation of the ideas of philosophy and history
of philosophy which happened after the crisis of spiritualism, during the
1870s, when French philosophers started importing new philosophical texts
from Germany. Encouraged by Lachelier and Ravaisson, Boutroux had spent
two years (1868–1870) in Heidelberg, and had followed, along with the lec-
tures given by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), those of Edmund
Zeller (1814–1908). A decade later, between 1877 and 1884, he translated
Zeller’s Philosophy of the Greeks Considered in its Historical Development
(1844–1852). Academic philosophy of the early 1870s shared some of the
12 G. BIANCO

problems that German philosophy suffered twenty years before: the growing
success of different forms of ‘positivism’ which were criticizing either idealism
or spiritualism. In the Discours sur l’esprit positif (1844), Auguste Comte (1798–
1857) formulated the third and most complete version of his law of three
stages, declaring that the metaphysical stage of the human mind, the one
coming after the theological and before the scientific, was over once and
for all. Two decades later, in the introduction of his History of English literature
(1863), Taine isolated three factors useful to understanding all cultural
phenomena: race, milieu and moment; he left no space for the free Ego,
base of the PLA. Ribot and Espinas, followed their path and introduced two
ways of studying the human animal in a ‘positive way’: psychology and
sociology.
In 1877, when Boutroux published in the new-born Revue philosophique the
long essay “E. Zeller et sa théorie de l’histoire de la philosophie”, he implicitly
presented his work as the remedy to all of the deterministic or materialistic
interpretations of the history of knowledge. The end of the essay, where Bou-
troux describes philosophy as ‘both artistic and scientific’, is exemplary:
philosophy starts its work eternally anew, just as an artist, who does not want to
simply complete, with a new touch, the part of beauty that her predecessors
could not finish, but wants to express, by its own, the totality of beauty all at
once [d’un seul coup], as she conceives it. Philosophy is a personal work. In a
way, it does not transmit itself. Each man creates his own system […]. But it
responds as well to the need to measure the importance and value of scientific
knowledge and to deploy this faculty of initiative and creation.
(Boutroux, “E. Zeller et sa théorie de l’histoire de la philosophie. III”, 664)

Boutroux described history of philosophy, for the first time in France, as a

series of all-encompassing new theories, the systems created, or invented,
just as works of art, by exceptional figures, philosophers. These producers of
philosophy were carefully distinguished from historians of philosophy and
from professors of philosophy, simple reproducers. These ideas were tightly
connected to Boutroux’s PhD dissertation On the Contingency of the Laws of
Nature (1874), where he had argued that science, through mathematical con-
ventional signs, homogenizes and reduces a more concrete reality, marked by
creativity and novelty – terms he used in great abundance. Psychology, ethics
and metaphysics were obviously taking into account the most contingent
aspects of reality. Boutroux’s doctrine was dependent on those of his two
masters, Ravaisson and Lachelier (see Capeillères, “Généalogie d’un néokan-
tisme français à propos d’Émile Boutroux”), but neither of these two
mentors gave great importance to creativity and novelty. In his doctoral dis-
sertation De l’habitude (1838) Ravaisson spoke of a ‘free activity’ and ‘sponta-
neity’ present in man and nature, but never of novelty, creation or invention.
These terms briefly appeared in his La philosophie en France au XIX siècle
(1867), where, agreeing with Janet’s and Lemoine’s opposition to the alienists’
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 13

analogy between genius and madness, Ravaisson tied genius to creation and
imagination. Five years later, in Le fondement de l’induction (1872), Lachelier
defined freedom as the “the power of varying one’s plans and conceiving
new ideas”. Nonetheless this ‘novelty’ was always tied to a ‘divine plan’, it
depended on the ‘law of final causes’. Ravaisson and Lachelier, trained
during the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, could not assign to man
the divine power of creating without falling into the trap of atheism and
pantheism.
On the contrary, Boutroux connected the concept of personality to those of
freedom, novelty and contingency. Given that Boutroux had been teaching at
the Ecole normale from 1878 until 1885, and then at the Sorbonne, taking the
place of Janet as the most powerful academic philosophical, his idea of phil-
osophy influenced generations of students and readers. Bergson was one of
those, but not the only one. Another philosopher who admired his work
was William James (1842–1910): in his Will to Believe. Essays in Popular Philos-
ophy (1898), the brother of the novelist Henry James (1843–1916) considered
the possibility that men, by believing, could create facts. James depicted the
philosopher as a ‘creator of values’. In his last work, A Pluralistic Universe (1907),
James introduced the importance of ‘originality’ in philosophy, a quality that
he found at the highest level in Bergson.

7. Philosophical anomia
In 1870s France, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was the philosopher of the day
(see Becquemont and Mucchielli, Le cas Spencer). Ribot and his friend Alfred
Espinas (1844–1922) admired his version of ‘evolutionism’ and translated
his Principles of Psychology in 1874. Only the most orthodox positivists and
Kantians dismissed entirely his theories, and several philosophers such as
the spiritualists Bergson and Alfred Fouillée (1838–1912) read and discussed
his works, recognizing their value. Spencer’s success was not only due to
the association of his natural philosophy with that of Charles Darwin (1809–
1882), and of his psychology with that of John Stuart Mill, but also to his con-
tribution to a new discipline, the name of which had been coined by Comte a
few decades earlier: sociology. Spencer conceived society in continuity with
nature: the same process governs nature and society, consisting in the
gradual differentiation of a simple homogeneity towards a growing complex-
ity and heterogeneity; this process was said to be accompanied by an inte-
gration of the differentiated parts. Basing his reflections on the work of the
Scottish founders of political economy, Spencer’s texts tackled a problem:
how one could promote a progressive integration of the over-differentiated
parts of a society?
Following the footsteps of Spencer, in The Division of Labour in Society
(1893) Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) tried to explain the historical reasons of
14 G. BIANCO

social differentiation and the rise of individualism inside Western societies,

warning that, without a complementary cohesion, societies may end in a
pathological state of anomie, namely a dysfunction due to the absence of
shared norms. In the conclusion of his book, Durkheim explained that
anomie could also affect the organization of knowledge-production, marked
by a progressive specialization, a fact that was noticed by many of his contem-
poraries, even by Bergson (see Bergson, “La spécialité”, 261). While Comte
believed in philosophy as a discipline dealing with ‘scientific generalities’,
able to master the totality of the sciences as a government masters society,
Durkheim thought that this task was in vain, given that it would be impossible
for one man to grasp even the most superficial aspects of all the sciences. The
solution was practical: it was sociology, which had the role of organising an
effective division of intellectual labour.
Two years later, Durkheim, who had had the opportunity to spend a period
(1885–1886) at the universities of Marburg, Berlin and Leipzig, and was there-
fore able to compare the German and French academic systems (see, for
example, Durkheim, “La philosophie dans les universités allemandes”), pub-
lished a polemical essay: “L’enseignement philosophique et l’agrégation de
philosophie.” The paper was a response to a debate concerning the place
of philosophy in French teaching and research institutions, a debate that
started in 1884 when Espinas depicted French philosophy as a useless con-
ceptual gymnastics that disregarded the sciences.3 While during the 1880s
the Revue philosophique was implicitly encouraging the idea of a progressive
absorption of philosophy into the sciences, on the contrary the new-born
Revue de métaphysique et de morale adopted a strong neo-Kantian position,
according to which philosophy had to exist as an independent discipline.
Durkheim located the beginning of philosophy’s crises at the end of
Cousin’s ‘reign’. The father of eclectic spiritualism had assigned philosophy
with the task of insuring a national unity through the inculcation of a set of
values and beliefs. After his demise, the curricula he created did not
change, and his spiritualist disciples still occupied all of the chairs of philos-
ophy. Nevertheless, as a result of laws in the 1870s ensuring the freedom of
teaching, these philosophers did not have to conform to any specific doctrine.
Philosophy no longer had any clear objective, except the one of helping stu-
dents in formulating clear statements expressing opinions about general
questions. As a result, philosophy had become a simple “intellectual gymnas-
tics”, consisting in combining “abstract concepts” just as “the artists combine
forms and images”. According to Durkheim, professors were not teaching
their students to seek truth using logical and rigorous thinking, but rather

3
Espinas, “L’agrégation de philosophie.” This essay was part of a discussion started after the establishe-
ment of the new curriculum in philosophy (1880), in the pages of the Revue internationale de
l’enseignement.
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 15

“distinction” and “originality”, using a stock of arguments and concepts. Sep-

arated from the sciences, philosophy turned into an “anarchic dilettantism”,
consisting in using terms without “any precise meaning but the one
imposed each time they were used”.
The problem of an effective organization of intellectual labour as a means
of obtaining scientific and moral progress was common to the scholars of the
second part of the nineteenth century, and Durkheim’s reflections influenced
many of his younger colleagues. One of these was the philosopher André
Lalande (1867–1963), who had been his student during the 1880s and had
a great esteem for him (see Lalande, André Lalande par lui-même, 63). In his
PhD dissertation, L’idée directrice de la dissolution, opposée à celle de l’évolution
dans la méthode des sciences physiques et morales (1899), Lalande both praised
and criticized Spencer. According to him, the idea of ‘dissolution’ would be a
better description of the movement towards unification proper to cultural
phenomena. He saw the history of humanity as marked by the abandonment
of the heteroclite beliefs and theories peculiar to different human groups, by
the adoption of a scientific framework and by the use of common laws regu-
lating their behaviour. According to Lalande, men should actively promote this
movement of dissolution, contributing to human progress, both scientific and
social. Consequently, in the conclusion of the book, Lalande did not hesitate in
attacking Bergson’s conception of a pure freedom, aiming at promoting differ-
ence and creation, as both immoral and scientifically retrograde.

8. The search for clarity

While Lalande was writing his dissertation, the Anglophone world was being
touched by the belated success of Hegelianism, which a part of the intellec-
tual community perceived as highly obscure. While in late-Victorian Britain
new academic reforms had placed psychology and ethics inside a new under-
graduate honours course in ‘moral sciences’, the most prominent North Amer-
ican universities were hesitating between the British and German models of
academic organization. This situation provoked new debates about the iden-
tity of and the vocabulary used in the ‘humanities’.
In 1896 the American journal The Monist published an article in which the
German Rudolf Eucken (1846–1926) reflected on the results of his 1879 History
of Philosophical Terminology (Eucken, “Philosophical Terminology and its
History. Expository and Appellatory”); at the same moment, in the pages of
the British journal Mind, an autodidact polymath, Victoria Welby (1837–
1912), published two important essays on semiology (Welby, “Meaning and
Metaphor”; “Sense, Meaning, and Interpretation”). At the end of the same
year, Welby promoted a prize for an essay on “the causes of the present
obscurity and confusion in psychological and philosophical terminology,
and the directions in which we may hope for efficient practical remedy”.
16 G. BIANCO

This prize provoked the publication – in Germany, England, the United States,
Italy and France – of new essays problematizing philosophy’s terminology and
of philosophical dictionaries.4 The ‘Welby prize’ was awarded to the sociol-
ogist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936), author of Community and Civil Society
(1887), influenced by Comte and Spencer. Tönnies’s essay, published in the
1899 and 1900 issues of Mind, sketched a definition of signs and language
and a history of the evolution of knowledge-production since the Middle
Ages, focusing on psychology, the emerging science of man, and in particular
on the concept of ‘will’. Its aim was to tackle the problem of equivocity in phil-
osophy and psychology, what he called the main ‘pathology’ proper to the
organization of science. According to Tönnies, once a ‘handmaid’ of theology,
philosophy had become a ‘vagabond’. As with Durkheim, the solution to this
problem was practical: science had to be standardized and internationalized.
The unification of the sciences of man – namely the integration of biological,
psychological and sociological knowledge – was supposed to be organized on
an international scale, through the use of controlled concepts and an artificial
language. According to Tönnies, the main obstacle to a progressive and orga-
nized development of science was philosophy’s proximity to the ‘Belles lettres’,
incarnating nationalistic and particularistic values. Tönnies did not hesitate to
stigmatize those, like William James, who refused to look for a definition of the
basic notions of psychology, since these notions were attached to a free ‘soul’.
In 1898, in the Revue de métaphysique, André Lalande published a paper
relating the debates preceding the prize, underlining the importance of an
international dictionary of philosophical terms. This dictionary would
require the creation of a French philosophical society in order to start organiz-
ing a network of collaborators and a series of international congresses.
Lalande – who asked for the help of his colleagues at the Revue de métaphy-
sique – was imitating other disciplines, such as statistics, psychology and soci-
ology, which, since the 1850s, started legitimizing themselves through
international gatherings, societies and vocabularies. It was because of his
interest in sociology that Lalande had been able to imagine a series of
devices aiming at concretely contributing to the communication between
different scholars (to what he had called ‘dissolution’), to follow Durkheim’s
path and even to use some of his own terms, such as ‘solidarity’ and ‘social
pressure’. According to Lalande, professionalized French philosophers had
been “raised almost without exception in the school of novelists and they
refuse[d] science as it is given [faite], they consider[ed] banal all which
[was] […] not coming fresh from their minds, they always want[ed] to
create something new” (Lalande, “Le langage philosophique et l’unité de la
philosophie”, 568). While the bases of all scientific disciplines were taught in
only a few years to students who were then able to contribute to their field

4
For an assessment, see Stancati, “Une page d’histoire de la lexicographie en France et en Italie.”
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 17

following a set of relatively stable concepts and methods, philosophers were,

from the first years, involved in never-ending discussions without being able
to share any theoretical framework. Lalande expressed a firm refusal of an
‘artistic’ conception of philosophy, conceived as an “integral reconstruction
of the world made by everyone from her personal point of view” (Lalande,
“Le langage philosophique”, 576). Against this conception, reminiscent of Bou-
troux’s, and its focus on ‘personality’, Lalande advocated ‘universality’. In his
further articles, the young philosopher would attach the subjectivist con-
ception of philosophy to Descartes and, more generally, to authors following
the Reformation: they all promoted the idea that the production of knowledge
was the outcome of the work of a free individual defying authority. While this
approach was valid in a time in which knowledge production had to gain
independence from religion, it was useless and counter-productive at the
beginning of the twentieth century (see Lalande, “Sur la critique et la
fixation du langage philosophique”).
During the following years Lalande would work on a Vocabulaire technique
et critique de la philosophie, on the creation of a French philosophical society
and on a series of international congresses he thought were necessary in
order to accomplish this task. During this process Lalande relied on Boutroux
as academic guarantor, and on Couturat as a collaborator (see Roux, “Couturat
et Lalande: quelles réformes du langage?”). Couturat’s life was marked by two
endeavours: grounding mathematical knowledge on symbolic logic and con-
tributing to the development of an artificial language allowing for communi-
cation between scholars. Despite having progressively abandoned his former
Kantian position, he was still convinced, against Poincaré, of the aprioricity of
some the most basic mathematical principles. That is why, immediately after
the publication of Le Roy’s article “Science et philosophie” (1899–1900), Cou-
turat reacted by harshly criticizing his radical conventionalism, nominalism
and irrationalism (see Couturat, “Contre le nominalisme de M. Le Roy” and
De Buzon, “Couturat adversaire du nominalisme”), beginning a polemic that
would last a decade.
Despite their differences, both Lalande and Couturat considered gratuitous
creativity and imagination as obstacles to science’s progress. The latter was
suspicious even of public discussions, during which a philosopher could use
her rhetorical talent in order to impose her concepts; in a letter he wrote
that he considered the international congresses to be fairs where philoso-
phers meet in order to ‘expose’ their systems, just like goods they want to
sell.5 Much as Tönnies with James, both Lalande and Couturat were suspicious
of Le Roy and Bergson, considered as the worst inheritance of Boutroux.

5
Letter of Louis Couturat to Xavier Léon from the 20th of July 1900, quoted in Soulié Les philosophes en
République. L’aventure intellectuelle de la Revue de métaphysique et de morale et de la Société française
de philosophie (1891-1914), Rennes.
18 G. BIANCO

9. Metafisica rediviva
In 1901 and in 1902, during the first discussions that took place at the Société
française de philosophie (see Lalande, “Propositions concernant l’emploi de
certains termes philosophiques”) these conflicts became public. Léon
Brunschvicg (1869–1944) and Élie Halévy (1870–1937), Lalande’s friends and
colleagues, considered it to be very difficult to fix a philosophical vocabulary
given philosophy’s proximity to the sciences (Lalande, “Propositions”, 82–83)
and given also the existence of conflicting positions concerning the system of
ideas implied by certain terms (Lalande, “Propositions”, 84, 92). Despite his
further engagement in the project of the Vocabulaire, Bergson’s critiques
were the most radical. For him there were concepts that were ‘wholly’ philo-
sophical, proper to metaphysics and to ethics, and irreducible to scientific
concepts. Bergson was implicitly following the tradition of Ravaisson, Lache-
lier and Boutroux in hierarchizing the levels of reality and the sciences study-
ing them according to their degrees of contingency or freedom. In the case of
concepts concerning the levels of reality marked by a ‘high amount’ of
freedom and contingency, it was counter-productive to aim for a definition,
and one had to use vague and obscure ideas. Bergson concluded that one
did not have to “choose between concepts, but create new ones” (Lalande,
“Propositions”, 98–99).
At this moment Bergson’s position inside the philosophical field was
peculiar: he was not teaching in a provincial university, nor in a high school,
nor at the Ecole normale, but, thanks to the help of Ribot, he had become a
professor at the prestigious Collège de France, in the chair of Greek and
Roman philosophy. He aimed at conquering the chair of modern philosophy
that had been assigned to the lawyer and sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843–
1904) the year before, and was given hope as Tarde wanted to quit that
chair for a new one, in social psychology. Bergson’s comfortable position at
the Collège de France gave him an intellectual freedom that he did not
have before. In the 1903 ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, his arguments fol-
lowed a hard opposition. On the one hand there is metaphysics, led by
non-symbolic, sympathetic, absolute and intuitive knowledge of the ‘con-
crete’; on the other hand there is science: relative, marked by intellect,
symbols and concepts, namely abstract ideas. According to Bergson positive
metaphysics was expected to “make an absolutely new effort for each new
object”, producing a concept “appropriate to its own object”, consisting in a
contingent, free, changing reality, avoiding already existing concepts. Philos-
ophy would have the responsibility of guiding the progress of knowledge by
uniting metaphysical intuition with scientific intelligence. What Bergson stig-
matized the most were philosophical the attempts, made by philosophy, at
using opposed concepts in order to grasp a fluid reality. In the following writ-
ings – including the 1923 answer given to an inquiry on philosophical
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 19

language (Bourquin. Comment doivent écrire les philosophes?) – he would

propose avoiding technical words in order to designate new concepts. Tech-
nical words would in fact reinforce ready-made distinctions.
Why did Bergson speak, all of a sudden, of ‘metaphysics’, relating it to the
notion of ‘intuition’? Le Roy, the first author who related intuition to philos-
ophy, never mentioned metaphysics, and in the “Note sur l’origine psycholo-
gique dans notre croyance dans la causalité”, presented in the summer of
1900 at the first international congress held in Paris, Bergson never mentioned
it. This position would change slightly a few months later, in “Parallèlisme
psycho-physique et la métaphysique positive” (1901): according to Bergson
here, psychology could help the ‘progress’ of metaphysics, turning it into a
positive knowledge able to ‘mould’ facts. In a speech given to the students
of the lycée Voltaire, “De l’intelligence” (1902), the terms ‘tension’, ‘effort’,
‘attention’ and ‘illumination’ appear, but not yet intuition nor metaphysics.
Bergson aimed at ‘rebranding’ his theories according to the way in which the
philosophical field and his position inside it had changed. Given that he already
had a permanent position at the Collège de France, in the chair of ‘Greek and
Roman Philosophy’, he no longer needed the support of Ribot, who had
been his first ‘promoter’, and who would have been extremely sceptical of
anyone explicitly appealing to metaphysics. Nonetheless, Bergson targeted
the chair of ‘Modern Philosophy’, since it was reserved for the producer of phil-
osophy that he thought he was, and not for the re-producer, namely a historian,
that he was not. Bergson was also targeting another chair, that at the Académie
de Sciences Morales, occupied by Ravaisson until his death in 1900. Ravaisson
was, just like his pupils Lachelier and Boutroux, a defender of the possibility
of another metaphysics, connected to spiritualist psychology and forming a
whole called ‘philosophy’, as the philosophy curricula were stating.
Just a few months after the publication of “Introduction to metaphysics”,
Bergson was elected to the chair of ‘Modern Philosophy’ at the Collège de
France, left vacant after Tarde’s death, replaced Ravaisson in his chair at the
Académie, and even wrote a bibliographic note about the latter’s life and
works, published in 1904. By using ‘metaphysics’ in an article published in
the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, a journal whose inaugural essay
had been written by Ravaisson (Ravaisson, “Métaphysique et morale”),
Bergson aimed at redefining it against the conception defended by his
‘Kantian’ adversaries, admirers of Renouvier. Two years before passing away,
in 1901, Renouvier published a book intended to give a systematic reading
of the history of philosophical systems, Les Dilemmes de la métaphysique
pure. In the first page of the introduction of the book, entitled “Position du
problème”, Renouvier proposed a way of philosophizing diametrically
opposed to that of Bergson. He wanted to use a ‘dichotomical method’ to
analyse metaphysical systems, in order to reduce them to a series of solutions
to a very limited set of problems. Renouvier used Kant’s ‘Antinomies of Pure
20 G. BIANCO

Reason’ to read the history of philosophy as being dominated by five pairs of

contradictory theses, or problems, terminating in dilemmas. The ‘solution’ to
the problem of the existence of contradictory solutions was practical and con-
sisted in the belief in freedom, in so far as freedom was essential in order to
make possible the existence of the other oppositions. Choosing freedom,
‘choosing choice’, would have, as a consequence, been the solution to all of
the other problems. Let us keep in mind that the vision of the history of phil-
osophy proposed by Renouvier was static, and that he had shown extreme
suspicion towards the three big epistemological events that marked the last
decades of the century as well as Bergson’s trajectory: positive psychology,
the theory of evolution and non-Euclidian geometries.

10. The fortune of philosophical creation

Bergson’s position on philosophical creativity would become even stronger
when, after having published Creative Evolution (1907), the book which
earned him the Nobel Prize and international fame, he published a long
preface to a collection of his essays, La Pensée et le Mouvant (1934). The
second part of the preface was paradigmatically entitled “On the position
of problems”. According to Bergson, any real philosopher has to avoid the
common ways of treating problems, influenced by the mundane necessities
of life. Philosophy requires avoiding ‘choosing’ a pre-determined solution
and demands “a new effort for each new problem”. This effort has the
result of ‘dissolving’ the old ways of posing problems, and reconfiguring
them in a creative manner. In a passage resonating with Ribot’s Essai sur l’ima-
gination créatrice, Bergson wrote:
Already in mathematics and still more in metaphysics, the effort of invention
consists most often in raising the problem, in creating the terms in which it
will be stated. The stating and solving of the problem are here very close to
being equivalent; the truly great problems are set forth only when they are
solved. But many little problems are in the same position.
(Bergson, The Creative Mind, 58)

In a letter to Floris Delattre (1880–1950), Bergson would take an even stron-

ger position:
In philosophy, I call amateur the one who accepts as they are given the terms of
a common problem; she believes it is posed once and for all, and limits herself to
choosing between solutions to this problem, pre-existing her choice […]. I call
philosopher the one who creates the solution, necessarily unique, to the
problem she posed anew, while she was making the effort of solving it.
(Bergson, “Lettre à Floris Delattre”, 1528)

The English translation of La Pensée et le mouvant as The Creative Mind, is in

itself a symptom of the popularization of Bergson’s creative, artistic and
 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 21

‘vitalist’ conception of philosophy that spread all over Europe and in the
Americas during the first three decades of the century. In Germany, after
the decomposition of the Neo-Kantian front, this conception nourished the
‘movement’ of Lebensphilosophie. While in Britain his influence was almost
immediately blocked by Bertrand Russell’s violent pamphlet The Philosophy
of Henri Bergson (1911) and by the further diffusion of analytic philosophy,
in the United States, it had a brief success thanks to William James. Nonethe-
less, just as in England, in the United States Bergson’s success was ephemeral,
because of the crucial importance of analytic philosophy. One would have to
wait for Gilles Deleuze, to see the idea of philosophy as ‘creation of problems
and concepts’ re-emerge, but this is another story.

Funding
This work was supported by Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo
[Grant Number 2015/04381-4].

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